Smart Industry - Driving Industrie 4.0 for all of Europe

It is almost two years ago that I published a blog post on Industrie 4.0 seeing it as a major challenge and new area for Europe to be addressed. Since then the topic of Industrie 4.0 got a lot of traction in Germany. There are reports about Industrie 4.0 in the German media almost every day.

Also a lot of excellent work has been done. The German Platform Industrie 4.0, which was initiated and supported by the three main German industry associations for Industrie 4.0, BITKOM, VDMA, and ZVEI, did major pioneering work in defining architecture principles, use cases, producing market insights. All future work in Germany and beyond is well positioned building on this work.

Regarding standardisation,  in Germany the DIN/DKE steering committee on Industrie 4.0 coordinates the ongoing work and gives key guidance. Moreover, globally many activities have started or strengthened in Internet of Things and M2M standardisation.

In the meantime a number of activities are also taking place in other countries in Europe as well as globally. The Industrial Internet Consortium, which was founded in the US and rapidly grew into an influential and highly agile global network, is moving on with high speed creating markets and preparing the ways for technology development and adoption.

The new European Commission has now also taken up the topic and is decided to promote it as a major area of interest for Europe. Following this strategy the topic of Smart Industry was one of the four major selected topic areas under discussion at last week's stakeholder forum DIGITAL4EU organised by DG CONNECT.

I had arrived in time in Brussels to follow the discussion which was excellent and much to the point. There was unanimous agreement in the room about the relevance of the topic for Europe and the need to lead. From my perspective: smart industry is clearly one of the main areas for the next decades for policy makers, industry and society. And will further transform the way we are working and operating in production, manufacturing, automation, down to consumer behaviour and opportunities regarding customisation of products and individual choice.

I am all excited about this to continue. The next step is to get things right: identify needs on the policy level so that industry can flourish and drive things based on identified market requirements. And for standardisation: the environment for successful global standards is available and good work is under way. All promising ... let's jointly work to make it a success for Europe.

New version of EU Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation available

Since middle of last week the new version of the European Commission's ICT Standardisation Rolling Plan is publicly available on the Commission website.

As the first year's version of the Rolling Plan this second edition was also developed in close collaboration of the European Commission and the ICT Multi-Stakeholder Platform. The result is a document that has much improved from last year's version being more inclusive, more comprehensive, better structured and - perhaps most importantly - being more clear on the proposed actions.

I can only encourage anyone interested or involved in ICT standardisation and in EU policy to take a look. I am sure this Rolling Plan 2015 will be interesting to you and provide major insights on the needs public authorities face regarding standardisation in support of the implementation of policy objectives.

Time to celebrate: 20 years of W3C

We all take it for granted to use the internet and to be sure that everything works and is inter-operable. So today is a perfect day to remind us that there is some smart and hard work behind that all - and a lot is based on global open standards, developed collaboratively and agreed in consensus.

The leading organisation for interoperability standards underlying the world wide web is W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium.

Today, W3C celebrate their 20th anniversary.  This is a great occasion to outline the high contribution of W3C to the digital revolution of the past two decades. Congratulations to W3C and all the best for continuing your great work to the benefit of the internet and the digital age.

Hurrah .......

UK government adopts Open Document Format standard for collaboration on documents

Yesterday the Minister of the Cabinet Office in the UK, Francis Maude, announced that the UK government adopts the Open Document Format (ODF) standard for documents that are presented for collaboration and interaction. Two other standards, PDF/A and HTML, are chosen for viewing government information.

I admire the UK government for this decision. ODF is the established standard for documents. It is used in OpenOffice , in LibreOffice, and also in Microsoft Office. Gone are the days of the battle about OOXML and the debates about ODF versus OOXML. That's the stuff of last decade. The UK government now made the step into the future direction supporting and requiring an open standard for document formats that is widely available and implemented in a number of competing products and solutions.

I wish other governments would be fast in following this example. With increasing online collaboration, with using Cloud technologies, with moving to increased automation, the use of ODF is the right move for promoting interoperability, competition and choice.

I have been using ODF implementations for many years now. I am working with odt, odp and ods files on a daily basis. I am highly satisfied – and I am sure that clear decisions in favour of ODF will push further innovation around ODF.

So great news from the UK. I hope they will spread fast and wide.

Very sad news: Frank Schirrmacher is dead

I am shocked at today's news of the sudden death of Frank Schirrmacher, co-editor of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, intellectual and a truely free thinker. Germany and Europe will miss Frank Schirrmacher as an always inspiring source for thoughts and ideas driving the public debate and rasing important issues.

UK government pushing for ODF as preferred standard for document formats

The UK government has moved ahead with their strategy to put stronger focus on open standards in the public sector. One important element here is the decision to select ODF as the preferred standard for document formats. ODF is widely supported, including by big vendors of software for office suits as well as in open source offerings.


There was an interesting article on PCWorld looking at the standards issue and debate underlying the decision of the UK government. Definitely worth reading.

CEN, CENELEC, ETSI hand over white paper on Cyber Security to Commissioner VP Kroes

Earlier this week a delegation of CEN, CENELEC and ETSI headed by MEP Dr. Christian Ehler met with Commissioner VP Kroes for handing over the white paper on cyber security that was developed within the Cyber Security Coordination Group (CSCG) established by the three European Standards Organisations (ESO).

The White Paper is available for download on the CSCG website which is hosted by DIN.

For some pictures of the event see also the respective web site from the Commission. ETSI has also published an announcement with some good links leading a bit further.

At first reading the White Paper is very much high level and spans from generic political recommendations to the actual technology work in standardisation. Certainly a good, broad overview of aspects to consider further.

As ETSI point out in their press release, a lot of work is already ongoing in security standardisation, most notably in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 but, of course, also in IETF, W3C and IEEE and others. As I strongly believe in bottom up approaches as it comes to standards developments it will be the chance of the stakeholders in IT security technologies to map the white paper recommendations with their work and take up whatevery makes sense and in whatever organisation has the best expertise for doing the work.